Petros Chrisostomou ”Pandora’s Box”
Garis & Hahn
This event has ended.
New work by New York-based British artist, Petros Chrisostomou. The artist’s first show at the gallery will
feature photographs of assembled objects and their intervention upon the luxurious architectural
models he creates. The illusionary effect Chrisostomou achieves highlights the artist’s playful
and theatrical approach to his art practice, which fluctuates between mimicry of the real world
and construction of a surrealistic reality.
Created from materials found in his new Brooklyn neighborhood, Chrisostomou incorporates the
ephemera of the everyday into his work—shopping for hair extensions and grooming products at
his local Bodegas and Dollar Stores he incorporates the geographic and social DNA of his
neighborhood into these works. Achieving both acknowledgement of globalized culture, as well
as the specifics of place, Chrisostomou’s work explores the idea of indigenous habitat. In this
way, the photographs become an homage to the real and imaginary characteristics of place,
and an examination by the artist of his own rootlessness and decentralized concept of a cultural
home. This translation of the familiar into the alien repurposes the objects used, already loaded
in their own references, creating tension in a scene both familiar and bizarre. The
grotesqueness achieved in these contrasts calls into question the perversity of our fetishization
of certain objects, from shoes, to hair-dos, to art.
In Pandora’s Box Chrisostomou revisits the classic Greek myth, in self-aware acknowledgement
of his own Greek Cypriot ethnicity, and in investigation of the concept of Myth itself through his
continued investigation of the cultural meaning of objects. Chrisostomou imbues his work with
feminine power and psycho-sexual imagery, a call-out of the often misogynistic interpretations
of the Pandora myth, and release from the haphazardness with which Pandora is said to have
unleashed the world’s evils. His work in these “boxes” lends literal consistency to the story of
Pandora’s eponymous box, as does the meta-concept of contemporary art display within the
standard “white box” space of the gallery. Ultimately, the show presents viewers with the
opportunity to contemplate the larger conceptual undertones of the iconic myth.
[Image: Petros Chrisostomou “Shoes with Balloons” (2010) Framed color photograph 14x11 in. Edition 2 of 5 + 3 A/P]
Media
Schedule
from July 30, 2013 to September 09, 2013